Hitherto, as a beverage contained in a closed container, various kinds of milky and soft drinks contained in cans are on sale. These canned beverages are on sale in cold or hot states by an automatic vending machine, etc.
As the material for the cans, a steel or aluminum is almost always used but bottles and plastic cans are also used for some beverages. In the case of a three-piece steel can for a beverage composed of three parts of upper and lower lid portions and a can trunk, the plate thickness of the can trunk is thick enough to keep the strength of the can trunk high to prevent a dent even when an inner pressure of the can is reduced. On the other hand, in the case of a two-piece aluminum can composed of two parts of a can trunk and a lid portion, for preventing the occurrence of denting of the can trunk composed of a thin plate, these cans are sold with an increased inner pressure of the can with a carbon dioxide gas as seen in canned beer and Coca-Cola (registered trade name). Accordingly, when such an aluminum can filled with Coca-Cola or beer at a high pressure is opened after shaking, bubbles foamed in the headspace and the content in the can spurt out of the can to sometimes cause a trouble of staining the hand and clothes of the consumer. Recently, a beverage such as milk coffee, milk tea, Wulong tea, chocolate drink, sports drink, etc., is filled in the two-piece aluminum or steel can together with liquid nitrogen and has been on sale as a can having a high inner pressure.
When a canned beverage is on sale as such a positively pressurized can and when the can is shaken by a consumer before opening the top or the can is taken out of a vending machine and is shaken during transporting in a car, a considerable amount of bubbles form in the blank head space in the can, and the bubbles are sprayed simultaneously with opening the lid and scattered around from the open portion to cause a problem of giving an unpleasant feeling to the consumers. Particularly in some cases, it becomes the habit with consumers to shake a can before opening, e.g., with a can containing milk coffee, etc., since, there is indicated on the can that the can is shaken before drinking for dispersing well the contents. Thus, the foregoing problem happens often.
For solving such a problem, some ideas are considered such as applying a new function to the opening portion of a can so that the content does not spurt out when the can is opened. For applying such a function, however, there are many technical difficulties, whereby no sufficiently satisfactory result has been obtained so far.
Also, another attempt is proposed to make a low foaming beverage composition which shows low foaming property even if the can is shaken before opening. However, since a beverage such as coffee, tea, powder milk, etc., is, in itself, liable to foam, there exist other technical difficulties.
As the result of various investigations under the above-described circumstances, the inventors have discovered that by adding an anti-foaming agent comprising a specific sucrose fatty acid ester as the effective component to a beverage, in a can containing the beverage, the occurrence of the content spurting out of the can and scattering on opening the can after shaking the can before opening can be prevented and have succeeded in attaining the present invention based on such discovery.